Almost there!!
Nice welcome into Tahiti
Finally made it to Christchurch!!
Wednesday 5 March 2014
Day 65: Tahiti airport and missing a day of our life
LA airport was extremely exciting, there was even a Victoria Secrets to Clem's delight. We were having so much fun in duty free we genuinely almost missed our flight. Disaster avoided we made it and a few hours later where Clem managed to sleep and I definitely didn't we arrived in extremely sunny Papeete, Tahiti. When we were booking our flights we didn't realise we would be stopping over in French Polynesia, if we had, we definitely would have tried to stay for a few nights-but sadly it was not to be. We had a 2 hour wait in a little waiting room which was half outside and then we were back on another plane to Auckland. This flight began extremely well, we ended up having an entire row of 4 just to ourselves and were stupidly grinning at how lucky we were...until a huge man began telling Clemmie to stand up so he could sit down in the seat next to her. At this point in time, the seat belt sign was still on and we were still in take off, the air hostess came running over and told him to sit down, so he fell down in the seat next to Clemmie, taking up more than his seat by a long way. The rest of the journey he proceeded to take photos of the film he was watching as well as laugh really loudly whilst everyone else was sleeping-completely bizarre. Sadly we realised that when we landed, due to the time difference, we lost a whole day of our lives as we were told just before we were about to land it was now the 6th not the 5th March. As soon as the plane landed Clem and I ran down the isle to get as far away as possible. Our journey not completely over, we still had another flight down to Christchurch this was fairly quick and we eventually ended up in Christchurch. However, we had a bit of a shocker as we had not booked a hostel or anything and spent the next 3 hours sitting in the airport, desperately searching hostel world, hostel booker, couch surfer, airbnb etc etc, hoping someone might have room for two tired travellers. Eventually at around half 5 we got a text from a lovely woman called Janice who told us she would be able to take us in and even pick us up from the airport- we told her she was our life saver.